Telecom Ramblings

Our neighbor in the telecom blogging world, Dan Caruso of Bear on Business fame as well as CEO of Zayo and executive chairman of Envysion, has been named CTP Communications Executive of the year! A hearty congratulations to Dan for this well deserved honor.  Nobody has single-handedly shaken up [Read more →]

At last week’s Citi EMT conference, international telecommunications carrier glbc gave an upbeat presentation where they reiterated the favorable market conditions they see for their products even in this ugly recession. But perhaps most interesting were the comments of CEO John Legere about consolidation in the sector, which were unusually frank and very much on the mark. Here is a quick transcription of [Read more →]

Shares of telecommunications carrier Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) had quite a week, entering Monday at $0.68 and closing Friday at $1.49, up 119%. I thought we were in the throes of a deepening recession that is going to start killing off anyone with debt? Volume just got bigger every day, the volume progression was 9M,16M,19M,54M,61M. What happened? Not much actually, and the rest of the sector was not nearly so lively.  I don’t think we can tie it back to one event. Instead, I’d say there has been a confluence [Read more →]

BearOnBusiness has lately been offering some amazing insight into the operation of a fiber based telecom over the past few days.  But today’s post, The Problem with Telecom Companies is a must-read.  The general idea is that many problems that are quickly blamed on nebulous backoffice failures really originate much earlier in the process.  If your sales force is confused about [Read more →]

Telegeography reports that Indian carrier Tata Communications is looking to raise some INR30B via debt and a rights issue, which works out to about $600M.   They hope to use the money to fund M&A, apparently in the USA and Europe.   Apparently though, they first need permission from the Indian government, which owns more than a quarter of the company, and they have asked before and not gotten it. [Read more →]

They may not have caught up on those pesky SEC filings yet, but abvt is still getting stronger.  Today they announced an expansion to Austin Texas,  opening their 15th metro market.  I’m not going to dig it up, but I doubt they have expanded to a new market since before their spectacular implosion during the bubble.  [Read more →]

At the Citi Global Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications conference this week, many carriers and service providers have been giving presentations.  And while most have done so cautiously and without disclosing much about the fourth quarter, there have been a few tidbits of information.  And those tidbits have not indicated [Read more →]

Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) today announced a new program they are calling the Verizon Port Partner Program which is aimed at winning CDN business.  The media of course picked this up and repeated it heavily, because it was about Verizon and content delivery and that has to be news, right?  But what is it exactly?  That’s the humorous part to me.  If you cut through all the marketing and packaging, here’s what Verizon did.  They [Read more →]

Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings), long the little brother of BT, FT, and DT in Europe’s corporate telecommunications market, is looking to move up in the world. The Spanish based carrier announced a big contract today worth €350M over 5 years with Deutsche Post, which amongst other things owns DHL and has 500K employees all over the world. Most of Telefonica’s €2B revenues from the corporate market come from places that speak, well, Spanish. A deal of this size is not minor at all, [Read more →]

As part of the debut of WiMax in Portland by clwr, the company demonstrated live streaming video over a mobile WiMax connection. And it was apparently on both ends. The video itself came off a commuter train, showing the scenery passing by, meaning that it was uploaded live via WiMax, and then downloaded. The movement of the train was followed on a map next to the video. As demonstrations go, it was pretty cool, even when the video stuttered as the train went through a tunnel. [Read more →]

Over the holidays, telecom giant Verizon (NYSE:VZ, news, filings) won a high profile lawsuit against OnlineNIC for cybersquatting, and was awarded $33.15M.  Apparently they went and registered all sorts of domains like itunesverizon, iphonefromverizon etc.  But in a rather humorous turn of events, it seems Verizon’s adversary may be beyond their reach.  According to InternetNews they are based in Xiamen, China and are one of the largest domain name registrars [Read more →]

Usually when a company is private, we get less information or even no information at all.  But there is the rare occasion when not having to worry as much about the timing of disclosures lets a private company give us information that a public company wouldn’t – at least not yet. Dan Caruso over on Bear On Business gave us all a bit of unexpected early information on the performance of Zayo Group (news, filings) yesterday as part of a series of blog posts detailing the company’s goals in 2009, and in an interview with [Read more →]

Ethernet equipment makers Force10 Networks and Turin Networks are joining forces, according to media reports.  This news follows on last month’s purchase of Ceterus by Overture, and of course Nortel is still shopping its Ethernet unit.  It certainly seems as if the the Carrier Ethernet equipment market is undergoing a bit of a consolidation frenzy.  Smaller players are seeking safety in numbers and in the cost savings they can eek out of the synergies there.  Of course that means [Read more →]

Last week, Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) wrapped up its refinancing activities just as 2008 came to an end.  With a new COO, an improved balance sheet, and the December layoffs probably complete as well, the company can start the new year with a fresh (though perhaps not clean) slate.  While we won’t know what Q4 looks like for a while yet, let’s try to summarize where the company seems to stand after [Read more →]

A new blog started up before Christmas, Infrastructure 2.0 by the folks from Infoblox. Their premise is fairly simple yet compelling. IP Networks of all scopes are becoming too large for the manual labor that administers them, the old way of doing things doesn’t scale to meet the next problems. Of course, network automation is what Infoblox is all about, so to an extent they are calling for the use of their own product – but that is a common thing these days in the blogosphere. After all, the people most interested in a subject and most qualified to ramble on about it are often those who hope to make a business out of it. The articles are insightful and [Read more →]

If Vitesse Semiconductor (PINK:VTSS, news, filings) were human, it would have been a medical miracle. The company, which manufactures a variety of semiconductor devices that go into equipment built by the likes of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings),  Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings), and Huawei, has been in a coma and left for dead by Wall Street for two years now. The story dates back to the stock option backdating scandals of a couple years ago. Remember those wonderful days, when scandals involving theft of a mere few million dollars seemed so important? Well, much of Vitesses’s top management went down in the flames, previous financials were disavowed, lawsuits and investigations started flying, and the company looked like it was about [Read more →]

As followers of the colocation and data center sector know, Dupont Fabros Technology (NYSE:DFT, news, filings) has been struggling with the credit markets since the crisis began.  They have suspended construction at several locations after being unable to raise the funds to complete the projects, and those sites now sit in limbo.  The uncertainty has just killed the stock price of course.  I do keep an eye on the company but not a close one, so it was only when a reader alerted me to the sustained insider activity over the last two months that I took a closer look.  I fully expected to see a token purchase here or there.  You know what I mean, the orchestrated ‘lets all buy a little stock to show everyone we believe in the company’ kind.  But I was surprised, it seems to go well beyond that.  [Read more →]

Thousands of internet and phone customers in six states across the southwest and in the Rockies had no service this New Years Eve, due to some good old fashioned telecom hardball.  q which is of course the incumbent provider in the region unceremoniously disconnected wireless internet provider SkyWi, ostensibly for nonpayment of bills. SkyWi competes directly with Qwest for retail customers, and uses Qwest’s wholesale services as part of its network.  Of course, both sides claim to be the reasonable one. [Read more →]

There’s no shortage of people out there making predictions for 2009, which means of course that there’s no stopping me either.  After all, looking back on 2008 is just painful, isn’t it?   So much happened that we’d all like to forget, whether in this sector or in the world in general.   For the internet infrastructure sector, I’ll categorize my prophesies, err I mean predictions, as related to Fiber, Data Centers, Content Distribution, or VoIP. So now let us gaze into the swirling mists of the Fiberoptic Ball  (I upgraded my Crystal set, this one has a 100Mbps ethernet hookup: [Read more →]

As the 2008 comes to a close, here is an update to where next generation fiber-based telecoms stand going into the new year. I have estimated 2009 EBITDA based on known trends or occasional wild guesses, just for kicks, and used current debt price estimates where available and educated guesses otherwise. One can assume rougher times and lower the EBITDA guesses but the numbers don’t actually change all that much. It’s still ugly out there of course, so without further ado: [Read more →]

The rumors that first appeared on FierceVoIP turned out to be the real deal. VoIP application provider broadsoft announced today that it is buying competitor sylantro. While both companies are private and so are the terms of the deal, it does appear to have been a one-sided affair. Broadsoft apparently will assume Sylantro’s debt and is buying the customer base for a song and maybe a dance but not much more. It was an open secret that Sylantro was running low on cash and with the credit markets in their current state of panic, there wasn’t much choice.

It has been clear for quite some time now that BroadSoft has been winning the [Read more →]

Is the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trying to win the award for Grinch of the decade?  In a WSJ article last week, the RIAA’s latest plan to punish teenagers in the name of intellectual property was detailed.  Apparently, their last idea of suing 35K people in the last 5 years hasn’t helped at all reduce illegal filesharing. (surprise surprise!)  The solution now?  Get ISPs to do all the work.  What do you think of the new plan? [Read more →]

Abolish the FCC?  That’s what Lawrence Lessig of Stanford wants Obama to do, abolish it and build a new regulatory body from scratch.  The article prompted the usual level of outrage (mostly in favor) across the blogosphere.  After all, calls for the abolition of the FCC happen just about every year, all you have to do is a Google search to see that much.  But the subject has extra meaning right now because of the coming Obama administration, which has publicly stated that access to broadband and internet policy will be a major focus area.
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